Raining… not only water, but cabinets…

It’s been really wet in Singapore the past few days.. actually almost the past week. Every day it rains either a tiny bit or a lot!

But that’s not the only thing that’s “fallen” this week. Yesterday we had an incident at work where suddenly a huge cabinet came crashing down. The cabinet was maybe 5 ft x 5 ft with cubby holes and a few cabinet doors. It was used to hold binders of files and some books. Suddenly you heard a few cracks, a crash, then half the lights went off. One of our poor technicians was injured as it hit her elbow and hip. She was cornered between a counter and the fallen cabinet. She could do nothing except try to protect herself. She suffered a few abrasions and was sent home for a few days to recuperate. The fallen cabinet dented the computer CPU, ripped out the light switch, broke a few letter trays, and scattered all the binders, papers, and books all over the floor. It disrupted our work for quite a while.

However, the response from the hospital was quite good. Within 10 minutes of it falling, someone from (I think) engineering came by to see what happened and right away called other people to help out and survey the incident. Our “big” boss also came by to check out the scene. I only had a chance to help to clean up a bit and walked our technician to the Emergency Dept to get checked out. By the time I got back, the cabinet was removed and they were taking photos of the wall where the cabinet has been nailed in place. Apparently it was not so secure because there weren’t that many nails.

It was a rather scary incident as we have quite a few cabinets that are mounted on the wall but they will also be looked at to make sure they are secure. Our technician stayed home to rest today but should be back at work tomorrow. I take that as a good sign that she wasn’t seriously injured as it could have been much worse. Anyone of us could have been standing right in front of that cabinet and who knows how we would’ve reacted…

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